Gary Reback whirls a US Cavalry saber through the stillness of the paneled boardroom. "Incredible," he says, his brown eyes sparkling like diodes. He takes a hard look at the curved 3-foot blade, which once armed a Civil War horseman, and resumes whacking at the air.

Whooosh ... whooooooosh.

"Think about how these guys fought," Reback says. "You were up there, alone and exposed. Smoke. Lots of confusion. Yelling. People trying to kill you from every side. Your horse wanting to bolt ... terrifying."

Freud would have killed for this tableau.

While the weaponry of the age necessitated the crude hand-to-hand combat tactics of the Civil Warrior, Reback - a history buff who received the sword as a gift from his wife - easily relates to the desperate struggle of a distant brother in arms fighting for his life. As one of the most important and most embattled legal voices in high tech, he regularly engages in similarly fierce, if metaphorical, internecine warfare.

If there is one man Bill Gates fears - and there may be only one man Bill Gates fears - it is Gary Reback, the high-flying point man for high tech legal battles at Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich &AMP Rosati. For years, Reback has challenged Microsoft's bullyboy tactics, sometimes representing anonymous clients who fear the software behemoth's reprisals. In 1994, the Department of Justice took over the Federal Trade Commission's stalled investigation into Microsoft's alleged antitrust practices.

The probe related to the company's DOSmarketing tactics and ultimately produced a consent decree, in which Microsoft agreed not to use its operating system dominance to take advantage of rivals.But that was not enough for Reback, who filed a legal brief on behalf of several anonymous clients - now widely believed to include Novell,Borland, and Sun - that prodded US District Court judge Stanley Sporkin to reject the proposed decree. (An appeals court later reversed Sporkin's ruling, foiling Reback's gambit.)

After Microsoft announced in October 1994 that it planned to purchase electronic checkbook maker Intuit for US$2 billion, Reback and a team of attorneys filed a white paper with the Justice Department attacking the consolidation's long-term implications. The DOJ filed suit to block the deal, arguing that a Microsoft-Intuit merger would reduce competition, raise software prices, and quell financial-software innovation. The proposed buyout collapsed.

And Reback continues to ride Microsoft's billion-dollar butt. Last summer, he fired off letters to the DOJ charging that Microsoft had violated the 1994 decree. His clients claimed Microsoft was forcing computer makers to pay $3 more per system for Windows 95 if they didn't preinstall Microsoft's Internet Explorer Web browser. By doing so, they concluded, Microsoft was engaging in anticompetitive practices against Netscape.

Federal and state investigators support these claims. In February, the Texas attorney general's office sent Microsoft a civil investigative demand, the state's version of a subpoena, requesting information about Microsoft's competitive practices in the Internet software market. One concern: Microsoft plans to offer Internet Explorer 4.0 as the interface for Windows 95, which, according to Dataquest, will come installed on 76 percent of all PCs shipped this year. This free installation could effectively freeze the $59 Netscape browser out of the market. In addition, Microsoft's proposed $425 million purchase of WebTV Networks has the DOJ's antitrust division sniffing around. The department extended its standard 30-day review to gather more information about the deal announced in April.

Microsoft critics like Reback fear that rather than merely trying to "embrace and extend" the Internet - as Gates explained in a 1995 speech - the Microsoft mogul intends to swallow it whole. "It's not just our lunch, but our carcasses, that Microsoft wants to eat," Reback says. "There are grave societal consequences to that strategy. Here is a new technology and a whole new wave of opportunity that Microsoft wants to suck into its operating system to maintain its monopoly."

The software giant is not the only target in Reback's sights. His workload typically includes 12 to 15 cases. Late last year, he unsuccessfully represented Lexis-Nexis in an attempt to foil Thomson Corporation's $3.4 billion acquisition of West Publishing Company, a deal that united the nation's two largest legal publishers. (See "Who Owns the Law?" Wired 2.05, page 98.) And Reback is now defending a handful of Silicon Valley's premier software companies against royalty payments IBM is demanding on patents the attorney claims should never have been
issued.

But it's his series of relentless attacks on Microsoft that remains Reback's cause célèbre, simultaneously a powerful lightning rod and a jewel-encrusted calling card. In the Valley, where Microsoft's ubiquity hangs like smog on an August afternoon, people love or loathe Gary Reback. To some, he's a heroic, farseeing paladin in an industry swimming in self-absorption. To others, he's a misguided and pompous little putz, hell-bent on seeking personal glory. There is, however, one fact nobody can deny: if there's one person who's going to help define antitrust law for the 21st century, it's Gary Reback.

Live Wire

It's only a little after 11 a.m. on a crisp, clear morning, and already Reback is primal, impatient, incisive, nerve-racked, frustrated beyond all limits. As usual, he's doing several things at once: talking, going through voicemail and email, sighing, making lunch plans, canceling lunch plans, peppering his secretary Kathy with questions and requests, rescheduling flights (he logged more than 100,000 air miles last year), rummaging through photocopied newspaper clips featuring his name.

This weekend, he'll speak at conferences in Phoenix and Palm Springs, causing him to miss his daughter's birthday party and to struggle again with the guilt a "perpetual" work week produces. One side of him wants desperately to escape the limelight; the other revels in it. It's like he's grabbed a downed power line and can't let go.

When he's on a roll Reback speaks fast, one word tumbling into another, with more vocal peaks and valleys than a German opera. And it all comes out in a world-weary effusion of hyperlinked questions, answers, complaints, and diatribes.

"I'm supposed to get together some talks for these panels, and who the hell - please don't print that - knows what I'm going to say? And even after it's done, I can't play golf. Or tennis. I have a bad disk in my neck. I screwed up my rotator cuff ... geez, it's been 10 years since I've even worked a clutch ... so I'll swim, maybe a thousand meters, or just sit around and drink heavily. But the rotten part is that I'm going to miss my daughter's birthday ... but maybe they won't notice I'm gone, because we're remodeling, and there's dirt and grime and terrible things everywhere ... I'm 47 and really too old and tired to have kids this young. I just hope they don't turn out to be rabble-rousers like I did. I mean, some judge in Washington sneezes, and I have to go charging out to the airport and get on an airplane ... Did I ever tell you how boring my life is?"

Really?

Despite a schedule that would eviscerate most people, Reback appears slim and fit; gray wisps in his hair are the only signs betraying the fact that he's 10 years older than he looks. He wears a sharp, tidy outfit: crisply pressed shirt and pants, and an eggplant-colored tie that divides his shirt like an exclamation point. His stiff coiffure is accented by a pointy slice of hair that seems permanently affixed to his forehead.

There's one question, however, that ripples his composure. "Do I look like a glory seeker?" he responds, two parts defensive and one part surprised. He becomes distracted and momentarily loses his poise. "When I hear this I think, You must be kidding. There's got to be an easier way to make a living than litigating against monopolists and the government."

Horsepuckey, say critics, who regularly derogate Reback in print and in private. "He's always out there with his Superman shirt on," one observer caustically notes. "He likes being seen as a shit-disturber, but he's really just out to see his star rise." Rob O'Regan, an executive editor at PC Week, labeled Reback one of the Turkeys of the Year for 1996. O'Regan describes him as a "headline-seeking lawyer, currently peddling his wares to Netscape in its battle for world domination against Microsoft." (Not that Netscape has exactly been squeaky-clean in these escalating browser wars. The company was slow in releasing source code for its JavaScript development language to third parties - a page right out of Microsoft's strategy book.)

Such attacks may grow wearisome, but they cause little visible damage, possibly because years of courtroom conflict have toughened Reback. "I've seen judges pound him into the ground like a stake, and it all rolls off him," said Bob Kohn, general counsel for Pretty Good Privacy. "He's got pretty thick
skin."

Reback knows that he's been sucked into a jet engine. He could instead have chosen to chew on the fat of the new economy. Although he doesn't invest in the companies he represents, Reback could easily collect his estimated $1 million-plus annual compensation by presiding over an array of mergers, acquisitions, and endless legal maneuvers. "But that wouldn't satisfy me here," he says, tapping his chest. Reback's battles against Microsoft, he insists, are merely the outward signs of a much deeper philosophical desire to preserve a truly free market economy. "Look, this is not Moby Dick," he says. "But someone needs to stand up and say, This is wrong. The little guy can't."

Lofty words, but perhaps a trifle overinflated. The little guy? Netscape? Borland? Novell? He smiles at the irony. "OK, I guess you could say I'm the Robin Hood of the Rich. But look: By virtue of Bill Gates's business acumen and hard work, he deserves to be rich - really rich. But he does not deserve to be more powerful than the president. He has no counterbalance restraining force the way Congress checks Clinton. There is nobody to stand in his path should he wish to insinuate his view on Internet content. Gates will run roughshod as long as the government allows him to do it. Sometimes it seems that the only way the FTC would hurt him is if he fell down their steps and hit his head."

New economy, old models

Despite his unrelenting attacks on Microsoft, Reback sees the company's tactics as the symptoms of a disease, rather than the causes. He reserves his most caustic comments for certain economists, who he says are "often in deep space." The problem, Reback adds, is that many analysts are asleep at the switch, applying old laissez-faire models to new economic models.

The main underpinning of this ideology is the belief that free and competitive markets bring supply and demand into equilibrium and ensure the best allocation of resources. But Reback's DOJ white paper relies heavily on a different school of thought in antitrust economics, that of increasing returns. The model, championed by the Santa Fe Institute's Brian Arthur, among others, shares strong parallels with modern nonlinear physics and doesn't accept laissez-faire's traditional checks-and balances.

Instead, the concept of increasing returns allows that small, random events occurring at critical historical moments can determine choices in technology that are extremely difficult and expensive to change, resulting in a "lock-in" of inferior products. Production costs consequently fall, and the technology becomes entrenched, regardless of advantages alternative products or services offer. The leading product tends to stay ahead and even increase its lead. Predictable, shared markets are no longer guaranteed, and the best technology doesn't always win. Some textbook examples: the QWERTY keyboard, the VHS videocassette format - and Microsoft's Windows operating system.

"And if somebody controls that technology standard, they will choke you and choke you and choke you," Reback says. "If you let a company seize control of multiple standards, they'll choke you to death. Sound familiar?"

Although the theory of increasing returns has been around for more than a decade, it was slow to percolate up to the DOJ, which often seems - or acts - as if no one there has heard of it. "This is not fringe economics anymore," says Garth Saloner, an economist at the Stanford Business School. "It's mainstream, except in antitrust, which always lags."

Reback stumps with the furor of an old-time Dixie politico, spreading the word of increasing returns. His favorite audiences are next-generation lawyers, and he's a frequent speaker at major law schools.

His fear is that the DOJ's lack of contemporary economic insight could cripple the new economy. "An economic model is only as good as its assumptions, and if the assumptions are not illuminated by business experience, then what you're going to get is something that might make theoretical sense but has no bearing on the real world," Reback says. "You can't imagine how many times we've had to deal with economists in the DOJ who have, literally, no business experience. I don't mean no business experience in the markets in which we're arguing about. I mean, literally, no business
experience."

In fall 1996, the Department of Justice appointed Joel Klein as chief trustbuster. Klein, 49, is an administration insider who spent two years as Clinton's deputy counsel. Klein has a reputation for being far more pragmatic and cautious than his predecessor, the crusading Assistant US Attorney General Anne Bingaman - which won't make Reback's task any easier. "What we need to know is," says Reback, "Is Justice prepared to take action against Microsoft at this stage? And if not now, when? After Netscape is out of business? We've got a window where they could intervene to maintain and enhance competition. If they don't, are they saying they will never intervene?"

Reback views Klein's appointment with cautious optimism - and offers this bit of advice: "An economic analysis is a political judgment. Right now the antitrust division is being held hostage by the economists. It can't assume that economists come up with absolute truths. You get out of the model what you put in. If you bring to the model an understanding of how business actually works, then you're going to get some results that would be predictive of how businesses will grow. If you bring to the model a lack of understanding of the real world, then you're going to get garbage."

Southern accent

Pair a sharp mind with strong and challenging ideas, mix in a dollop of bullheaded commitment (some call it vanity), and pack it into a man who won't shut up. That's Reback. Any righteous minstrel's song may be rife with lamentations about the existing world order, but if he just sprawls in the muck yodeling about what a drag everything is and doesn't have a coherent program for change, he is bereft of hope. Reback's words and convictions dig and tear because they carry such mammoth repercussions, not because he's some wonderboy on a high-bound head trip.

Whence does this passion spring? Even after several conversations, it's hard to figure out exactly. Reback's background offers a few clues. He was born in Knoxville, Kentucky, in 1949, only a year after Claude Shannon published his first groundbreaking technical papers on information theory, a cornerstone of the computer age. Reback's father was a systems analyst at the Atomic Energy Commission in nearby Oak Ridge. Until he took on Microsoft, Reback's most rebellious moment occurred more than 30 years ago, when he was a senior at Fulton High School in Knoxville. He and some friends discovered that the school librarian was censoring books. Brimming with testosterone and visions of defending the First Amendment, they egged the librarian's house. Does a shit-disturber extraordinaire emerge from a fresh egg given flight?

Doubtful. Reback is adamantly apolitical, although he begrudgingly describes himself as a moderate Democrat - with one caveat: "I don't resonate with the left wing of the Democratic Party," he says.

After graduating magna cum laude from Yale University in 1971, he decided to get a law degree as a fail-safe. Reback didn't have any particular love of the law, he says. "It's just that I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to be challenged. I really wanted to go to a law school for flakes. Somebody said, Well, you want to go to Stanford out in California. Being a Southerner, that sounded about right."

Reback arrived in Northern California during the early 1970s, before the burgeoning PC industry had transformed Sunnyvale's and Cupertino's redolent peach and cherry groves into a chain of anonymous but meticulously manicured office parks. "California didn't seem real," he said. "There was so much blue sky. So much sun. It didn't seem like a place people really lived."

Perhaps it was that nirvanalike quality that sparked a revelation. Reback actually liked law school, and his insatiably curious mind dug into its intricacies. An antitrust class taught by William Baxter, who became head of the DOJ's antitrust division during the Reagan administration, gave him a charge. Reback even edited the Stanford Law Review.

Now, 20 years later, he finds himself in the fight that will undoubtedly define his professional career. And sometimes it turns ugly. Last year, a rumor surfaced that Microsoft had hired a gumshoe to tail Reback to try to find who was feeding him internal documents.

He dismisses such cloak-and-dagger episodes and claims to have never felt the hot breath of Microsoft as he drives home at night in his '88 sedan. "No," he laughs. "I haven't. Look, we have a history in this country of fighting things fairly on the merits. And I expect that to continue. Anyway, I'm constitutionally incapable of shutting
up."

Thespian flair

The hills overlooking the law offices of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich &AMP Rosati are famous for one thing: their combustibility. The hardscrabble ground is covered with a fine dry grass that burns furiously once ignited, fueling a raging fire that rapidly consumes everything in its path.

The same can be said of the law firm, formed in 1961 by John Wilson, who was joined a few years later by Larry Sonsini. As the Valley's high tech industry grew, so did the firm, now one of the industry's most powerful legal collectives. It was in Wilson Sonsini's offices, for instance, that Apple and NeXT officials secretly met to hammer out the details about how NeXT software could be melded with the Mac.

The two-story main headquarters barely clears the parking lot's eucalyptus saplings, but it encompasses 185,000 square feet. It's packed with 330 lawyers; new hires often scrunch up two to an office. The building has the feel of a high tech start-up, rather than a white-shoe law firm. To accommodate new lawyers - an average of two are hired each week - a 110,000-square-foot building is being constructed across the street and will be ready next summer. In recent years the firm has become a money factory: billings in 1996 topped $140 million, up about 30 percent from the year before. "It's this Valley," says CFO Harvey Schloss. "Business is crazy. And it makes everything else crazy."

The smell of high tech seems to have an amphetamine-like effect. Perhaps it's lawyers' billing rates - which can hit $395 an hour - that cause such acceleration, but everyone seems juiced. A steady stream of clients (including staff from Novell, Pixar, and Silicon Graphics) is greeted in the circular lobby and whisked away by Wilson Sonsini lawyers. A frowsy, latte-addled man in shorts and T-shirt manhandles a phone, talking about price/earnings ratios and projected five-year growth rates. Outside, two silver-haired men spill out of a sport utility vehicle that looks like it's never seen a backwoods fire road.

When Reback arrived in late 1991, six lawyers handled technology transactions licensing; now there are 24. Indeed, the Global Research Survey, which asked lawyers to rank law offices within the firms' specialties, placed Wilson Sonsini among the top 10 intellectual-property companies in the nation - the only West Coast partnership to make the list.

Reback first met with Wilson and Sonsini on a Friday afternoon, just as the lawyers were stowing golf clubs in car trunks before heading out for a three-day company retreat down in Pebble Beach. "We were all thinking, Whoa, what's Gary Reback doing here?" says one. Word of his reputation for courtroom ferocity had kicked around their halls before. In testimony before a US Senate committee on small business in 1982, a witness referred to Reback as "the most obnoxious and vicious lawyer I have ever met." Reback impishly smiles when recalling that description. "I gave him a hard time," he says. "That's what a lawyer does."

By Monday, Wilson Sonsini's lawyers knew - Reback was coming aboard. Coworkers originally stepped lightly around the new hire. At Fenwick &AMP West, his previous gig, he sometimes berated associates, bringing some to tears. But he was a rainmaker, so he was tolerated. Then a disagreement arose - the specifics of which are disputed by both sides - and Reback left Fenwick. Reback says he was looking for a firm that was more compatible, but some veterans say they were glad to see him go.

Reback's style is demanding and intense - he's a perfectionist in an imperfect world. When he knows which judge he'll face, Reback often reads years' worth of their decisions so he can buttress his case with the magistrate's own words. His research is intense and demanding on his staff. "I could be talking about something that happened in Indonesia - he'd relate it to Microsoft," says one former coworker.

Since Reback's arrival, the high-profile attorney has served as Wilson Sonsini's hood ornament, displaying a flair for theatricality in his courtroom presentations. One of his most memorable performances came when he successfully defended Borland against Lotus's copyright infringement lawsuit. Reback made two screen blowups, one of Borland's Paradox spreadsheet and another of Lotus 1-2-3's, from which his client's design was allegedly copied. He mounted the enlargements on cardboard panels and perched them on his shoulders during his closing arguments, becoming red in the face as the passion moved him. "He looked like Moses coming down from the mount," says Peter Detkin, who worked with Reback on the case before Detkin joined Intel as litigation director. "It was an amazing
sight."

Hardball

Such antics may raise conservative eyebrows, but Reback knows that he's playing hardball with some of the biggest and baddest companies out there. "Whatever it takes," he says. He recalls one Microsoft story, but refuses to divulge names: A Silicon Valley firm was going through tough times and tried to turn itself around. But Microsoft had other ideas and offered the struggling company's key software engineer a $1 million signing bonus. When the prospective employee said he could not report for work in Redmond for several months because of his upcoming wedding, Microsoft upped the ante: an additional $500,000 if he would quit his job immediately, regardless of when he actually reported to Redmond. The engineer took the job.

Microsoft then went after a second key employee in the same company, dangling a $1.5 million offer. When the local firm clenched its teeth and matched the offer, Microsoft responded with a $3 million counteroffer. Reback pulls out several similar emails, which flood his inbox daily:

"Microsoft offered me a hundred thousand dollars to develop the system with Microsoft BackOffice."

"In exchange for removing all references to Netscape from our site for a year, as well as optimizing the site for IE 3.0 and incorporating some of its special ActiveX technologies, Microsoft will make us one of four companies/sites profiled in a four-page full-color ad they're running in all Ziff-Davis publications (combined circulation of 11 million). Our site is best viewed with Netscape. We've optimized it for Netscape. We've even provided download information. But ... it is difficult for us to turn down a chance to ride Microsoft's promotional/PR activities."

Reback looks up from reading the email. "Is that predatory? You tell me."

Perhaps. Now he just has to convince the Feds. It's been a devilish task, and it has taken its toll emotionally, physically, psychologically. There are only so many times you can say something in plain English till you realize that your listeners don't hear the words because all they notice is a reflection of a spurious notion of the self, and a spurious passion, too. "Sometimes I wake up in the morning and feel like I've had enough," Reback admits. "I've got plenty of other legal work to do, and if the Valley doesn't want to fight the good fight, then why should I?"

Yet, a bit inexplicably, he remains committed to his Sisyphean task. When he closes his eyes at night, the sparks won't go away. The legal fires Reback sets will burn well into the next century. And the mud that's splashed on him is part of the road he chose to travel.

"Sometimes the attacks sting," Reback admits. "But y'know, when you're a lawyer, lots of times you have to defend causes you don't believe in. You might get up in the morning wondering whether you're making a contribution to society or not. I have no doubt about that. I don't lie awake nights wondering whether what I'm doing is right."